Textual context
Chidrupa, the eleventh chapter’s name, joins chit, consciousness, to rupa, form, and asks one question: what consciousness is like. The answer is that it has no form at all, and the compound names that formless form in the manner of the Upanishads, which call Brahman “satyasya satyam”, the real of the real, in the Brihadaranyaka, 2.1.20.
Ludwig Wittgenstein closed his Tractatus with the sentence that whatever cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence. Ashtavakra’s chidrupa is a name for that same unsayable thing, and the chapter spends its eight verses on the man who has reached it, since the thing itself admits no description.
Form of Consciousness
Form of Consciousness · 8 shlokas
The talk so far has been of dispassion. Here, for the first time, Ashtavakra says what the knower is like from inside. Eight verses, each a conviction, a settled certainty that loosens some inner knot by itself the moment it takes hold. What follows is a likeness, drawn for a king who is being asked to recognize his own face in it.
The word chidrupa, the form of consciousness, sits close to the prakasha-vimarsha scheme of Kashmir Shaiva thought, light and the light’s awareness of itself, which Abhinavagupta worked out in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Ashtavakra Gita is usually held to be the older text, and a reader who knows the later school finds its central pair already present in this one word.
So far
After dispassion, the form of consciousness. Eight certainties, and the man each one makes.
Ashtavakra has spent two chapters taking things from the king. Now he describes what the man who has let them go is like inside, and he does it in eight portraits, each built on a single word, nishchayi, the one who is certain. The first certainty: being, non-being and change all come about by nature itself, svabhava, and the man who knows this is unperturbed; whatever rises or passes, nothing in him is disturbed, and his peace costs him no effort. The second certainty names the Lord. Ishvara is the maker of everything, and there is no other maker here; the man certain of it feels every hope inside him melt away, since there is no one else to petition, and he stays at peace, attached nowhere.
Shlokas 1 · 2
Ashtavakra said:
One who is certain that existence, non-existence and change come about by nature itself is unperturbed and free of distress, and easily finds peace.
One who is certain that the Lord is the maker of all and that there is no other here, with every hope melted away within, is at peace and attached to nothing.
The third certainty concerns the two things a court watches most closely, calamity and fortune. Both arrive in their own season, and both come from daiva, destiny, which no decree can hurry or hold back. The man certain of this is always content; his senses rest in their own places, and he neither reaches for what is coming nor mourns what has gone. The fourth widens the same certainty to pleasure and pain, and to birth and death. Whoever knows that these too come from destiny alone sees nothing left that he must achieve, lives without strain, and goes on acting, as a king must, without the action leaving a mark on him.
Shlokas 3 · 4
One who is certain that misfortune and fortune come in their own time from destiny alone is always content, his senses at rest; he neither desires nor grieves.
One who is certain that pleasure and pain, birth and death come from destiny alone sees nothing left to accomplish, is free of strain, and even while acting is not tainted.
The fifth certainty is the smallest and the most practical. Suffering is born of chinta, anxious thought, and of nothing else; an event is one thing, and the worry laid over it, the turning of it over at night, is where the suffering lives. The man free of that worry is happy and at peace, and desire drains out of him on every side. The sixth is the certainty the whole dialogue has been circling: I am not the body, the body is not mine, I am awareness. Whoever holds it has as good as reached kaivalya, aloneness, and the ledger of what he did and what he failed to do no longer comes to mind.
Shlokas 5 · 6
One who is certain that suffering here is born of anxious thought and of nothing else, being free of it, is happy and at peace, his desires melted away everywhere.
One who is certain “I am not the body, the body is not mine, I am awareness” has, as it were, attained absolute aloneness, and does not recall what he did or left undone.
The seventh certainty is the widest. From Brahma, the creator at the top of the worlds, down to a tuft of grass, there is only I; the man certain of it is free of mental constructs, pure, at peace, and untroubled by what he has gained and what he has not, since both lie inside the one he is. The eighth and last turns the universe over in the hand and sets it down. All these wonders are nothing at all; whoever knows this is emptied of latent desire, a bare pulse of awareness, and rests as though nothing existed. The portraits are finished. Janaka has not spoken since the seventh chapter, and what he has been listening to, through all eight, is a description of himself.
Shlokas 7 · 8
One who is certain “I alone am all, from Brahma down to a blade of grass” is free of mental constructs, pure and at peace, and indifferent to what is gained and what is not.
One who is certain that this universe of many wonders is nothing at all is free of latent desires, pure pulsing awareness, and rests in peace as though nothing existed.